Why The Status Quo Is Doomed, Part 1

We’re like the passengers on the Titanic 10 minutes after the mighty ship struck the iceberg: there is virtually no evidence to those on deck or those snug in their warm cabins that everything they reckoned was safe and secure was doomed to perish.

Only those who witnessed the damage below the waterline and who knew the limitations of the ship’s design grasped that the loss of the ship was inevitable and could not be reversed.

The current world-system (call it whatever you like–cartel-crony neoliberal-state capitalism, etc.) is as doomed as the Titanic, for the same reasons: the design of the system is the source of its failure.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss the inevitable systemic failure of the current arrangement with Chris Martenson of PeakProsperity.com and Cris Sheridan of the Financial Sense Newshour. The podcasts are:

With Chris Martenson: Fixing The Way We Work: Closing the wealth gap with meaningful work (44:54)

With Cris Sheridan: Book Interview: A Radically Beneficial World

Why is the current world-system doomed?

1. Automation will not just continue replacing human labor–the pace of this trend is increasing exponentially.

2. The wishful thinking that technology always creates more jobs than it destroys is, well, wishful thinking: just ask the music industry, which “grew” in the era of digital technology from a $14 billion industry to a $7 billion industry.

3. The wishful thinking that taxing the owners of robots and software will pay for guaranteed income for all: nobody who favors this seems to have done any math. Current corporate profits (which are about to be eviscerated by global recession and the commoditization of goods and services via automation) are around $1.9 trillion annually, while current government (federal, state, local) spending is $6.2 trillion.

So if the state took every single dollar of corporate profit (and how realistic is that?), that would fund less than a third of current state spending. And if the state is going to pay tens of millions of additional households a guaranteed income, state expenditures will rise by trillions more.